Phonological Competition during Spoken-Word Recognition in Infants and Adults

Marlene Spangenberg, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Kim Plunkett, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Abstract

An ongoing debate concerns whether spoken word recognition happens
in an incremental or continuous manner (Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989;
McClelland & Elman, 1986). In the current study, participants (31 adults and 49
infants aged 24-30months) were presented with four images while they heard a
sentence like “Look at the cat”. Among the images was one object that
rhymed with the spoken word, one object that shared its onset and two
phonologically unrelated objects. Growth curve analysis of eye-tracking data
revealed that adults preferentially fixated onset competitors over unrelated
objects soon after word onset but did not preferentially fixate rhyme
competitors. Fixations of the onset competitors were modulated by the degree to
which the onsets of the three remaining competitors were phonologically similar
to the spoken word. Infants showed no preference for either type of
phonologically related competitor. The absence of a rhyme effect contradicts
continuous theories of spoken word recognition.